In 1998 Gus Van Sandt directed a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal masterstroke
Psycho. Many people generally dismiss remakes out of some sense of propriety, but a good redux may just add a new perspective onto a work. Van Sandt decided, however, to remake the film shot for shot. It was a terrible idea for one simple reason: it undermined artistic integrity and simply flipped the bird at the audience, and probably even Hitchcock himself. For all intents and purposes, Van Sandt helmed the film with certain aplomb and the players fulfilled their roles successfully. But that didn’t take away from the fact that the whole affair just felt dirty. While indie-rockers Get Well Soon aren’t so blatant, their latest release
Vexations falls into the same trap of “been there done almost exactly that” to ill-effect. In short, if you’re an indie-kid then chances are you have this music in your library somewhere, under another moniker, done much better.
When you open your album with an “ambitious” piece that features minimalist strings and a female voice speaking some sort of passage from some sort of book... oh wait, this is pretty much just Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks with vocals, but minus the Swinton and the Kafka and the overall quality. In fact, this type of criticism is easy to lob at Get Well Soon. Each song seems to open an entry point into some other band who have crafted a similar sound. Sweeping, syrupy strings lead to harmless crescendos that only reach moderate levels of intrigue. Coldplay, The National, Death Cab for Cutie, Noah and the Whale all spring to mind and as much as dislike using other bands as a reference for a band’s sound, there is no way around it. This is just very derivative by nature, with very few interesting components. “Red Nose Day” simply drifts along with no real defining quality, and three filler tracks (“We Are Still...”, “We Are Ghosts”, “A Burial At Sea”) that go nowhere take away from the already poor flow of the album.
If anything is worthwhile on
Vexations, it is “Seneca’s Silence” and “5 Steps / 7 Swords”. The former is one of the few up tempo tracks, and although it apes The Killers a little too much, the trumpet lead finale is easily the shining moment on the album. “5 Steps / 7 Swords” utilizes a swaggering drum beat and morose horns to lead to the most interesting vocal passage on the disc. But with only two real shining moments and a few near misses, the bulk of the album collapses into a mess of mediocrity. There is nothing obtrusively poor about the quality of the songs, but with nothing really to inject a sense of importance, these pieces end up treading water. So to borrow from the tired cliche, the total is less then the sum of its parts, and those parts weren’t all too high to begin with.
So like Van Sandt’s “homage” to [i]Psycho[i], it might just be best to stick with the original. While Get Well Soon’s
Vexations is not exactly a remake, it seems like we’ve been down this road before. And like Van Sandt’s work, it won’t hurt you to listen to this album, but it might make you feel uneasy. It isn’t good listening music, it isn’t good background music. It just quite simply isn’t very good at all. If you’re in the mood for down tempo, melancholic, string laden indie-rock, go find something else to listen to that’s a little more interesting. And vaguely hip/ironic song names like “Werner Herzog Gets Shot” doesn’t help the cause at all. At least The Shin’s masked their influences with about 40 years as a gap.
